Scott Saunders
About Scott Saunders
Scott Saunders is an entrepreneur, investor, and the Founder of Happy Money. Scott has been recognized by Ernst and Young as an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year®, by Goldman Sachs as a Top 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneur, and has been featured in Bloomberg, Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything for Futuristic Fintech. Scott founded Happy Money with the mission of helping borrowers become savers and served as CEO from inception through over $100M in revenue, raising $150M in equity capital from venture capitalists and current and former presidents and CEOs of American Express, Goldman Sachs, ING Direct, PIMCO, and Visa. Scott is a leading consumer financial services innovator, building the first online lending platform using credit models based on cash flow and other behaviors not captured in the FICO Score. Through Happy Money, he forged partnerships with a national network of credit unions to help consumers pay off higher interest rate credit cards faster and cheaper and help credit unions compete nationally and digitally, funding over $5B in loans to more than 285,000 new credit union members. Scott holds patents for using psychometric analysis for determining credit risk and psychometric-based financial coaching. He developed the first financial personality quiz to help people understand their money habits, used game mechanics for the first time to help people pay off debt and save money, launched the first money app powered by psychology, and, discovering PTSD-like symptoms in young people caused by financially induced stress, he developed cognitive behavioral therapy to treat financial stress. Previously, Scott was an executive at Walz Group (acquired by LenderLive), a three-time Inc. 500 company serving the nation’s largest financial institutions. Scott led an investment in the company, subsequently landing key early clients and recruiting a new CEO and head of sales who grew revenue from $300K to $30M and a successful exit. Scott also worked in government as part of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s SBIC Program where he helped invest $700 million in newly formed venture capital firms, including a founding investment in Emergence Capital Partners, an investor in Box, Blend, Salesforce, Veeva, and Zoom. A son of an air force fighter pilot, Scott grew up around the world in England, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea. He and his wife Suzanne met in Washington DC, raised two children together in Laguna Beach, and now reside in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Scott holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.